On Transcendence (Pastors Talk, Ep. 255)
What is transcendence in church? On this episode of Pastors Talk, Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman discuss how the Reformation helped to recover transcendence in the church and what this looks like in a service. They discuss how understanding transcendence in a biblical way will affect your music choices for service and flesh out what transcendence consists of.
- The Recovery of Transcendence in Church
- What Does Transcendence Look Like in Church Services?
- How to Think About Music Relating to Transcendence
- What Does Transcendence Consist of?
Related Resources:
Books: Prayer, The Gospel and Personal Evangelism,
Podcast: On How the Reformation Changed Sunday Gatherings (with Jonathan Gibson), A Conversation with Michael Reeves, On Preaching (with John Piper)
Articles: A Biblical Theology of Corporate Prayer, Transcendence and Immanence in Parenting, Pastoring, Evangelism, and Discipleship, The Five Points of Calvinism and Your Church’s Sunday Meeting
Subscribe and listen to this episode on Spotify and Apple Podcast
Transcript
The following is a lightly edited transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Jonathan Leeman:
Hi, this is Jonathan Leeman.
Mark Dever:
This is Mark Dever.
Jonathan Leeman:
Welcome to this episode of 9Marks Pastors Talk.
Mark Dever:
Hold on. Is it 9Mark’s pastor talk? Or is it pastors?
Jonathan Leeman:
It’s pastors, and it’s without an apostrophe.
Mark Dever:
Is there an apostrophe in there? Is it the way a pastor talks?
Jonathan Leeman:
Neither singular nor plural apostrophe. Just pastors like adjectivally talk.
Mark Dever:
It’s not like car talk. Talk about cars. That’s not car talk. This is Pastors Talk.
Jonathan Leeman:
And you can learn more about us if you’re just tuning in for the first time, or if you’ve been tuning in for a while and you want to find ways to help donate and give to support the ministry at 9Marks.org. The topic today, Mark, is transcendence in our church services, our preaching, and ur evangelism.
Mark Dever:
Not church discipline?
Jonathan Leeman:
Mm-mm. We’ve done a couple of those now.
Mark Dever:
Is this 9Marks?
Jonathan Leeman:
Now we’re going to talk about transcendence.
Mark Dever:
We’re going to talk about God.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yes, we are. But let me set the stage here, all right?
Mark Dever:
OK.
Jonathan Leeman:
Going into a different domain to give you some sense of where I’m coming from. Alex Duke recently encouraged me to read this book written by a Christian who tells, it’s kind of a memoir, tells the story of a…
Mark Dever:
Augustine?
Jonathan Leeman:
You don’t know this book. You’ve not read this book. I’m fairly confident.
Mark Dever:
Bonaventura.
Jonathan Leeman:
It’s a recent book.
Mark Dever:
Bernardo Cliveau.
Jonathan Leeman:
It was written in the last year.
Mark Dever:
Oh, I got it on my…
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. Have you written anything in the last year?
Mark Dever:
I’m reading Chuck and Nancy Snyder’s notes from our picnic. They’re support letters over the years, deaf interpreters.
Jonathan Leeman:
So no books, no published books.
Mark Dever:
I read manuscripts of books that are going to be published, like the stuff you write.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, well, you do that. Well, this was written, a memoir. It tells a remarkable story about a family member who betrayed him deeply and his then working through the difficulty of forgiving that family member.
And the memoir offers, I would say, an amazingly transparent and vulnerable narrative of hurt and brokenness and struggling with his own faith. And finally, the forgiveness of this family member.
And as I said, he’s a Christian author and the book is narrated through Christian categories. But when Alex asked me for critique, I said, “His version of Christianity I take to be genuine, but it lacks a certain, and here I kind of, you know, dot, dot, dot, how to think about it.”
Mark Dever:
Transcendence.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, transcendence.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, I could guess an author like that. I’m not going to say his name; that wouldn’t be edifying. There’s a guy who was writing during my heyday who I think was very much like that.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, we could probably think of a number of examples. And what I meant when I said that is he clearly saw his family member’s act of betrayal as sin, and he used that word, and wickedness, and he used that word. But what he spent more time describing word count wise was the hurt and brokenness and the betrayal of the human level.
It didn’t feel to me, and maybe there’s just my own judgmental heart speaking like he was grappling with the sin against God. I think more crucially, his own struggles with faith didn’t seem to account for God as big and holy and transcendent.
Mark Dever:
I want to defend somebody being able to write about their own hurt.
Jonathan Leeman:
No, I think that’s right. There is that dimension. We could talk about eminence.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
But there’s also…
Mark Dever:
Especially with pain.
Jonathan Leeman:
And that’s –
Mark Dever:
I mean, go read a grief considered [A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis]
Jonathan Leeman:
No, that’s right. And so far, I realize this may not be the best illustration because he was dealing with someone’s betrayal of him.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
But then the family member wrote a chapter as well in their reconciliation. And it also just grappled a lot with his own ideas of God. And his descriptions of God finally were all about, and what he found healing in was God’s eminence. And that’s all good.
But I just still feel like throughout the book, there was a low view of God. And in describing that to Alex, he said to me, hey, let’s do one on transcendence. And I thought that was a great idea because it’s something I know we’ve talked about with regard to church services.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. You know, I was remarking to somebody the other day, that the Reformation was basically changing what happens on Sunday morning at church.
Jonathan Leeman:
What do you mean by that?
Mark Dever:
That was the Reformation.
Jonathan Leeman:
And what does that do with transcendence?
Is Church Service a Spiritual Transaction?
Mark Dever:
Is church service a spiritual version of a commercial transaction between people and a human institution? Or is it a witnessing of the transcendent and it being drawn into a truly awesome event?
Jonathan Leeman:
What do we mean when we’re talking about transcendence in this location?
Mark Dever:
The God who is not like us but makes himself known to us as other than us.
Has the Church Lost its Sense of God’s Sovereignty?
Jonathan Leeman:
Do you agree with David Wells’s thesis in God in the Waste Land, which argues the evangelical church has lost its sense of God’s sovereignty and holiness and he’s become weightless and no longer shapes our character outlook and practice?
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
Why do you agree?
Mark Dever:
When I’m on vacation and my wife and I visit churches, very often it’s… it feels to me predictable and prosaic. And when we have ministers from elsewhere visit here and preach, they will often lean over to me during the service and make some comment about the weightiness, the kavod of the time, not in an insulting way at all, but in an odd way.
Jonathan Leeman:
I remember when somebody was preaching Psalm 62 and he translated glory and weighty as kavod and I didn’t realize that His glory is his in some sense his weightiness. That was new to me.
Mark Dever:
I’m pretty glorious this year.
Jonathan Leeman:
Unusually.
Mark Dever:
No, I mean just here it is.
The Recovery of Transcendence in Church
Jonathan Leeman:
Typically. You said the Reformation was a recovery of transcendence. Dare I say that YRR, in a certain respect thinking about David Wells, YRR represented? One of its main planks, one of the main reasons it took off in a lower church, Baptist, evangelical milieu was a recovery of transcendence.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, but I think it’s just… That’s just a footnote to Piper’s ministry. I think basically the Lord has used John to recenter God in our thoughts. And I think what you’re calling the Young Restless and Reform Movement from the Colin Hansen article in CT years ago is just a sort of outskirts of that whole movement that you could see in some ways, Paul Washer and John MacArthur and Banner of Truth’s ministry.
There’s a lot of stuff that goes into it, but it’s the tip of the spear, and the great bulk of the shaft of that spear to me feels like it’s the way the Lord has used John Piper’s intense exegesis and exposition of God’s word centering so often around God himself, just demanding that we look at God in the text.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. Well, it was exactly John I thought about when I was having this conversation with Alex and thinking about how in a quote-unquote secular age in which everything’s been imitatized and no longer has the transcendence.
Mark Dever:
John is just unremittingly…
Jonathan Leeman:
He shows up and confronts us with this glorious huge…
Mark Dever:
Well, I’ve been in private conversations with John and other friends where we talk about something that’s been said in public by an evangelical leader or preacher or the preaching of somebody else who is a largely good and faithful minister.
And John will bemoan in a godly way, not in a condemning way of the other person, but in a longing way, he’ll bemoan the absence of God’s concern in a popular minister’s faithful teaching.
Jonathan Leeman:
I want to come back to that idea of preaching and teaching and what transcendence might look there in a moment. What was interesting is that this particular author of this memoir, locates it in a church in his own family’s experience in a church, yet he moves in the course of the story from a fairly formal liturgical Presbyterian church with prayers that extol God beautifully in all of his attributes, but in which he said they never touched down on people’s lives.
And so finally he found them empty and abstract and unhelpful. And so he leaves that church and he goes to a very casual church where he’s playing the drums in his swim trunks and barefoot. He makes a big deal of that fact, but they accept him exactly as he is.
What Does Transcendence Look Like in Church Services?
How does this conversation about transcendence show up in our church services or not? Let me ask it more concretely. Do you think about transcendence when you’re planning a church service?
Mark Dever:
I don’t use that word, but this may not be helpful, but if you remember Sylvester and Tweety Bird?
Jonathan Leeman:
I do, yeah. My kids wouldn’t.
Mark Dever:
There’s some image of Tweety Bird walking along a window ledge and two huge eyes of Sylvester just there that he doesn’t even notice at first. Then he learns he was there. That image we would not in a godly way, I think, is pretty much constantly with me in our services.
Jonathan Leeman:
You feel the Lord watching.
Mark Dever:
Yes. And that is the big thing, the huge thing. You know, what Alberto is thinking of Ryan, I just, it doesn’t register whether that hymn went well or not. That’s like embers that have, you know, just drifted away from the flame.
The flame is we’re in the presence of God and we will be with him for all eternity. And that is appearing in our time together on Sunday morning uniquely in a way it doesn’t in the rest of the week. And so I feel a full moon closeness to God corporately when we’re gathered and assembled as in this case, the Capitol Hill Baptist Church.
I think I do feel when I gather with other churches even, but I feel it more acutely probably when I’m just very aware of every aspect of our service and how it’s done very much with God in mind. Before God, in the presence of God, in the face of God. So yeah, that’s…
Coram Deo
Jonathan Leeman:
Coram Deo.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, that’s huge in my experience.
Jonathan Leeman:
How’d you get there? Is that just an innate godliness in you?
Mark Dever:
Oh, it’s interesting, brother. That’s an interesting question. In some ways, it predates my conversion. I think it’s related to the fact that God has always made me very concerned about teleology, and purpose. So when I’m a 12-year-old agnostic looking at my hand, seeing the skeleton and just thinking, what do I want to do with this before I die? So I think I’ve always been…
Jonathan Leeman:
An eminence of death and behind it eternality.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. So I think I’ve always been unsatisfied by temporary small things and I think that probably really aids me in a lot of ways. I think it probably is a hindrance to my normal relationships in some ways and probably my concern about smaller matters. Yeah, I think I by personality the way the Lord made me, I trust in His sovereignty, which made me keep my eye on big things.
And if it’s not the main thing, I’m, you know, like I just preached on Cleopas and the other disciple on the road to Emmaus. The commentary spends a ridiculous amount of time talking about who was that other disciple. I think that the Lord meant us to know he would have inspired it moving on, you know, like, like who wrote Hebrews?
I don’t care. I mean, if I was supposed to know, I would know, I don’t know. So I want to talk about what Hebrews talks about. I don’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about who wrote Hebrews. So if something is not clear in scripture and presented as something significant, then I don’t want to say I would never spend time on it, but I am by predisposition going to want to do that, which is most significant.
And I think that there are downsides to that in my own personal spiritual life. I think it makes me more concerned about justification than sanctification. Yeah, there’s all kinds of things we can think about. You’re talking about transcendence and public services.
Jonathan Leeman:
So an example of how those big Sylvester eyes show up in your mind and heart as you’re planning out a service, for instance, let me throw this out there because I feel like I’ve heard you say this in years past, is at the beginning of the service in the call to worship and a verse, am I right in remembering you won’t say any words like, turn to this passage or the apostle Paul says, you just start with the very words of God.
Mark Dever:
Yes, because what I want to happen, so the way our services are… talking about public service on Sunday morning. The way it’s structured, we have songs as people are coming in that we sing. They’re printed in our bulletins.
And then at a certain point when those three songs are done, there’s a person designated who’ll lead the service. They’re probably on staff at the church. And they’ll come up and they’ll say, good morning, welcome to this gathering of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church.
Then they’ll go through some stuff for visitors and then they’ll go through some announcements for our church family. And then at the very end of it, they’ll say something like, let’s take the next few moments in quietness as we prepare our hearts for our time together around God’s word.
Jonathan Leeman:
And you’re using that quietness both to help people prepare but also to draw, I assume, a kind of line between announcements time.
Mark Dever:
Exactly.
Jonathan Leeman:
And, OK, now we begin.
Mark Dever:
Exactly. Yeah. And then I would like that to be 60 seconds of silence. You have to get used to babies crying and papers rustling, all kinds of noise during it. But that’s not the point. That’s like the cattle lowing. You know, it’s just that that’s fine.
Jonathan Leeman:
When I led service at CHBC, I remember being told to actually watch the second hand on my watch. Because 60 seconds feels like a lot of time.
Mark Dever:
It feels like forever when you’re up there. But it’s so good for people to get their thoughts on the Lord, on kind of where they are, deal with stuff, and then kind of be ready to take something seriously.
And then what I always tell the service leader is the first thing we want to hear then with our ears is God’s word. That’s what calls us together as God’s people, God’s word. We are those who hear God’s word. And so literally the first thing we hear in the service is God’s word coming to us.
Jonathan Leeman:
Not throat-clearing introductions.
Mark Dever:
Not throat clearing, not the apostle Paul says, not in Romans 4:6, it’s just like literally God’s word.
Jonathan Leeman:
OK, so what are other things you do? That was one example that I thought of.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. Well, I mean, a similar thing like that at the end of the service. I will give the benediction almost always from the end of 2 Corinthians. “Now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all forevermore. Amen”. Please be seated. Let’s take a few moments of quietness now. And then, as we reflect on this…
Jonathan Leeman:
It forces that moment of quietness, forces people to reckon with what they’ve heard and who they are before the Almighty.
Mark Dever:
Before they start talking about it, did you see the game yesterday?
Jonathan Leeman:
Right.
Mark Dever:
I cannot believe Michigan beat Alabama. Before they get into all that, it’s just…
Jonathan Leeman:
I’m impressed. Good job.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. And we tell the pianist, don’t do something fancy. Don’t go into a Bach postlude. Literally quietly after 60 seconds, quietly start playing the last hymn we just sang. So to draw their mind gently back into what we were just experiencing. And then people begin to talk.
Jonathan Leeman:
True or false– That all of that counsel right there, all of that wiring that you’re putting in place to some extent is contextualized to a very entertainment-driven culture.
Mark Dever:
You mean in response to it.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. Well, like, hey, let’s have a moment of quiet. Let’s, you know, nothing too fancy from the piano. That to me sounds like Mark responding to entertainment culture. No? Like if you were planning a service in India or, you know, 17th-century Mongolia, you’d probably be seeing different things.
Mark Dever:
Well, there wouldn’t be pianos.
Jonathan Leeman:
No, that’s fair.
Mark Dever:
But whatever the instrument was. I’m not sure that’s true. I think I would want some kind of… So silence is trans-cultural.
Jonathan Leeman:
Sure.
Mark Dever:
And I think I’d want some kind of before God-ness corporately emphasized. However, that would be appropriately done.
How to Think About Music Relating to Transcendence
Jonathan Leeman:
The desire for music, how does that affect your choices on instrumentation and music selection?
Mark Dever:
Well, instrumentation I always feel half guilty about. I mean, Calvin didn’t believe in it. Spurgeon didn’t believe in it. Nobody between Calvin and Spurgeon believed in it.
I mean, Lutherans. So we’re kind of the weirdos. So I’m always a little like, I hope it’s OK we’re playing the piano. I’m not sure it is.
Jonathan Leeman:
I think it’s okay.
Mark Dever:
Maybe. I hope so. Not sure.
Jonathan Leeman:
You didn’t answer my question.
Mark Dever:
What was your question?
Jonathan Leeman:
How does the desire for transcendence impact those decisions or does it not enter in?
Mark Dever:
I think it should. I think it cannot mean just one style. So if transcendence is only, let all mortal flesh keep silent and with fear and trembling. Well, if it’s always that style.
Jonathan Leeman:
Old ominous minor.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, I think that is a wonderful style and I want to have that key on the keyboard as it were. But I want joy to be transcendent. I want a triumphal Beethoven tune to be triumphal or even a tune done by some groups I might not appreciate some of their theology, but man, some of their songs are pretty good.
You know, if there’s some way I can do that without distracting our congregation into false teaching. You know, I’ll use some very recently composed stuff that I think is just the congregation owns and sings, praising in the name of Jesus.
Jonathan Leeman:
Shine Jesus shine.
Mark Dever:
That might not quite do it, but you know, we can pick up old tunes like Auld Lang Syne and use them for “All Glory Be To Christ”. There are lots of different ways and lots of different tones that can be transcendent.
And our job is to figure out “Precious Lord”, “Jesus Paid It All”, “Stricken, Smitten, and Afflicted”, a recent Getty tune or Matt Merker, one by Connie, by Dear Wife, that are different in style from each other, but still very much before the Lord and bring us before the Lord.
Jonathan Leeman:
I think a transcendent song selection might include lyrics that possess some weightiness.
Mark Dever:
Agree.
Jonathan Leeman:
An emphasis on not just on our response to God, but a revelation of who he is.
Mark Dever:
Agree. Here’s a really simple chorus that we do. “He’s done so much for me. I cannot tell it all. I cannot tell it all…” It’s very repetitive. And it’s about what he’s done for me, but it’s he and I cannot tell it all. It’s so vast.
So I want to be very careful in not assuming that transcendence has to look like a certain European classical 300-year-old way or 900-year-old way. It just doesn’t. It can. And I think that’s a wonderful part of the mix.
But I want to be very resistant about thinking that transcendence has to be this certain kind of cultural solemnity. If we look at the Psalms, there’s a mixture of emphasis on revelation and emphasis on response, if we could put it like that.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, there’s even a place for short and repetitive.
Mark Dever:
So I love history. I think when the news crackled across the American radio networks on December 7th, 1941, that Pearl Harbor had been attacked, there was a solemnity. But I think when Germany surrendered, there was a different kind of solemnity.
There was joy, but you knew you were hearing something awesome. So solemnity and transcendence concern for God and his purposes isn’t just one flavor.
Jonathan Leeman:
There’s a place for December 7th and there’s a place for VE Day.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, and I think sometimes there are brothers who are all about transcendence and what it really is, part of it anyway, is a certain taste they like and they equate that with transcendence. And I just want to go like, ah, I think transcendence is more important and bigger than that. So I don’t want to screen out what you’re talking about, but I would like to pull the screen out and make the camera shot wider.
Jonathan Leeman:
At the same time, to continue to play Negative Nelly, I was doing a chapel at a Christian college chapel service. I was giving the talk and the music leading up to it was this refrain, Holy Spirit, breathe on me, breathe on me, breathe on me, breathe on me. And then literally, I’m not exaggerating, dozens and
Mark Dever:
Well, I know the old hymn.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, I don’t know if it was a hymn, it was a praise chorus and there weren’t verses. It was just that chorus line, breathe on me. And it was, and I looked around the room and people were engaged, but it felt vacuous to me because the Holy Spirit breathed on me over and over. If there’s no additional theology important, if that’s the balance of the service, if that’s the balance of what we’re hearing, we can put anything we want into it.
Mark Dever:
Agree.
Jonathan Leeman:
Right?
Mark Dever:
And so I think, And that’s why service planning is important, not just the one song, but give me the context. Is there a service leader? How has he introduced it? What’s the scripture reading or prayer after this? What gives the flavor to “He’s Done So Much For Me”?
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah.
Mark Dever:
Is it testimonies of how I got a new job and my car got a free repair? Or is it testimony of salvation and the gospel going to folks in Turkey?
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. No, that’s right. So let me commend with you, variety, and it doesn’t have to feel in, you know, one way or another, one cultural form or another. Nonetheless, the balance, I think, needs to have this weightiness, this curve-ode.
Now, here’s something interesting though. This is a comment from a pastor both of us know, a good friend, whose church service is a lot like ours, or a lot like CHBC’s and the Cheverly Baptist. He made this remark.
He said, an Anglican friend had a sabbatical this summer and visited a ton of churches and said that the Anglican churches, well, they got transcendence. My church got eminence. It was actually a compliment, but it did make me wonder what transcendence looks like in a low church environment.
What Does Transcendence Consist of?
Our vibe in all 9Marks churches is far more reverent than the vast majority of evangelical churches and yet this Anglican still placed our way of doing church on the other end of the transcendent spectrum. I found that interesting. Of course, this raises the question of what transcendence really consists of.
The role of architecture and aesthetics? Or something else. And I think the Anglican, what I took from that is the Anglican was thinking architecture, smells and bells, things like that. And people walk into Roman Catholic Church, and Anglican churches and think, oh, there’s a big vision of God here. Is there something misleading, something right about that? Any response to our friend’s comment?
Mark Dever:
Oh, well, as an Anglican in my heart, I don’t want to equate Anglicanism with smells and bells. So like, thank you, no. That’s the John Henry Newman Romanizing Movement, that’s the Oxford Movement.
So I reject that. Anglican in my mind is warm-hearted evangelical reform like Thomas Cranmer. So yeah, now culturally what Anglicanism is in 21st century America, yeah, Anglicans are often going to be used to wealth and the good architecture that can buy.
Jonathan Leeman:
Nice buildings.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, in a way that brings glory and honor to God, and I think it does. But no, it depends on what that brother would have meant. I mean, it could have meant some architecture.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, I think what I took from that is that people typically have high-church versus low-church conversations.
Mark Dever:
I think it’s too flat, man. There are just so many more directions things go in.
Jonathan Leeman:
OK, unpack that.
Mark Dever:
Well, I’ve had Presbyterian and Anglican folks at our service almost weekly comment to me. They don’t use the word, but the transcendence in our service.
Jonathan Leeman:
The solemnity, the weightiness, those are the words they’ll use.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, sometimes the length. But you know, I don’t think they’re commenting on the architecture. Yeah, I think I would have to know that individual to know that. I think what our friend said is probably largely true, even of the more serious, Baptist churches, as opposed to many Anglican churches. because of the structure of the service, of the Anglican service.
But I think I would think that we have accomplished the good of the structure of the Anglican service with less sense of obligation to particular forms. So I would say the advantages of such services, I feel here at CHBC we have.
Emphasizing Beauty in the Church
Jonathan Leeman:
There’s a temptation for guys like us, I think, to emphasize the content over some of the aesthetics. But if our friend Thomas Terry was sitting here and emphasizing the importance of beauty, he would say, well, let’s not go too anti-incarnational here and preserve some of that, which I assume you would agree with.
Mark Dever:
I do agree with that.
Jonathan Leeman:
Though I also enjoy the story. I feel like you’ve told me about a church that you attended in college that was old and had shag carpet.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
And there was something you said you found.
Mark Dever:
The paint was peeling on the ceiling. But man, everybody was there and packed in. And it was just a cool combination.
Jonathan Leeman:
Because?
Mark Dever:
Because there you have all those Duke profs and professors and students packed into a 1910 building that needed serious refurbishment. But they were clearly excited about the glorious gospel and the song that we were singing and the truth and the scriptures and those being preached and not the surroundings.
So the pedestrian nature of the surroundings caused the glory of the building to grow. It’s like staring… You know, it’s a tiny, tiny bit of staring at the glory of the incarnation and the cross, not just in the nativity or in a prosperous day of Jesus. But, you know, when Paul says that we are wasting away, you know, then we understand more of his glory.
Jonathan Leeman:
You can make these three things as short or as long as you want. Prayer, preaching, evangelism. Prayer. You say you want your prayers to bore non-Christians or something like that.
Mark Dever:
No, no, no that’s not right. I’d like my prayer to excite non-Christians, to open up a door of possibility.
Jonathan Leeman:
You said something like…
Mark Dever:
No, I’d like to pray so much that we’d bore the nominal Christians who only pretend to know God.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay. Which is to say, you’re bringing transcend… The fact that you pray as much as you do… One person standing in the congregation…
Mark Dever:
Yeah, that’s right. And we intend to spend that time in front of the Lord praying together.
Jonathan Leeman:
Which is predicated on the concept of transcendence and bringing that in.
Mark Dever:
Of God being real and hearing and caring.
Jonathan Leeman:
OK, so long prayers. Well, long deep, weighty prayers.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, the point is not endurance. The point is a freedom of access that we can actually speak to a God who will listen to us.
Jonathan Leeman:
Preaching.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, take the word seriously and that, you know, in your context that may mean 25 minutes of sermons, may mean 45 minutes of sermons, may mean 75 minutes of sermons, but give serious time to the reading of scriptures.
So we’ve got Psalm 44 coming up, this coming Sunday morning, Claire Morell, is going to read it for us. I’m looking forward to that. But we’ve also got Bobby preaching on Revelation 6–8 and that’s just going to be glorious.
Jonathan Leeman:
Oh, that will be good. But what about the content? What about your applications? I mean, a lot of guys, a relatability, the seeker sensitive movement, which is kind of deep in our DNA, all of us, I think, at least in the United States, wants us to be relatable.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
But you’re not thinking just about relatability. You’re thinking about those big Sylvester eyes. What does that mean to…
Mark Dever:
Well, relatable that I’m using English. And I’m not using 17th-century English. I’m using 21st-century English. So it’s relatable in that sense. I’m speaking about God and words that people understand. But no, I’ll try to come up with illustrations. I’ll try to come up with implications as we think through what this means for our lives.
Jonathan Leeman:
Evangelism, how do you bring a big view of God into your evangelism or do you not because they’re not there yet and you know, you want to be you lean into a relatability. Because that’s how we’re taught to evangelize.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, if there’s no big view of God, there’s no compulsion for me, the sinner, to change my life.
Transcendence in Evangelism
Jonathan Leeman:
So what does that sound like when you’re sharing the gospel?
Mark Dever:
Letting people know how powerful God is, how he’s our creator, how he is the one to whom we will give an account. Imagine if your parents were better to you than they’ve been. So, let’s say you are pretty good parents, but imagine if your parents were even better for you.
Imagine if your parents never did anything wrong to you. And imagine if you started stealing from them and slandering them to other people and even physically hurting one of them. You’re beginning to get the idea of what sin is. So, somehow we need to communicate the seriousness of our offense in part by communicating the grandeur and beauty of God himself.
Jonathan Leeman:
Excellent. Final comments, brother, on transcendence?
Mark Dever:
Good stuff to think about. Thank you.
Jonathan Leeman:
Thank you.
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A weekly conversation between Jonathan Leeman and Mark Dever about practical aspects of the Christian life and pastoral ministry.
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